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A review by debbiedays
Oxblood by Tom Benn
dark
emotional
sad
medium-paced
4.5
This is a story of three generations of women living in the wreckage of the violence caused by the men in their lives. It is a small mercy that these men are dead, but by then the damage has well and truly been done.
Of the three ‘women’, fourteen-year-old Jan had my whole heart. There was something about the touch-starved teenager that reminded me of Morrison’s Pecola. Something about the way she was failed so consistenly and specatularly that I found quite heartbreaking. Maybe it’s because I see traces of myself in her. In the way she was left to make sense of the bleakness of her world on her own. To seek warmth in the most inappropriate of places.
Oddly enough, I don’t blame her mother Carol. It’s not that she’s not at fault, but I feel certain that had I been left to clean up the blood of my lover who had just been bludgeoned to death, that I too would be completely ‘shit at life’. Her character haunts the corners of the book with the ghost of her perpetually horny ex lover at her side. It’s a testament, I think, to the author that she feels as much a ghost as he is.
I do, however, take issue with the grandmother. Nedra is the only functioning adult in the family and yet she chose to withhold any kind of affection from Jan. She struck me as the type of woman whose complicity helps keep not just herself, but all the other women in her life firmly chained to their lives of misery. Part, as Molly (iykyk) so succinctly put it ‘of the f***ing problem.’ The fact that she managed to care for all the other emotional orphans in the neighbourhood with such tenderness, however heartwarming, only made me want to yell at her all the more.
Mostly, I loved the writing and Jan’s chapters, without fail, left me wrecked. There was very little sentimentality in the prose which heightened the sense of gloom throughout. It’s been almost a week since I finished reading the book and I find myself still deeply affected by the story. Still wanting to give Jan the biggest hug. Still wanting to scream at Nedra. Still marvelling at certain lines and phrases. That, as far as I’m concerned, is the mark of a story well-told.
Of the three ‘women’, fourteen-year-old Jan had my whole heart. There was something about the touch-starved teenager that reminded me of Morrison’s Pecola. Something about the way she was failed so consistenly and specatularly that I found quite heartbreaking. Maybe it’s because I see traces of myself in her. In the way she was left to make sense of the bleakness of her world on her own. To seek warmth in the most inappropriate of places.
Oddly enough, I don’t blame her mother Carol. It’s not that she’s not at fault, but I feel certain that had I been left to clean up the blood of my lover who had just been bludgeoned to death, that I too would be completely ‘shit at life’. Her character haunts the corners of the book with the ghost of her perpetually horny ex lover at her side. It’s a testament, I think, to the author that she feels as much a ghost as he is.
I do, however, take issue with the grandmother. Nedra is the only functioning adult in the family and yet she chose to withhold any kind of affection from Jan. She struck me as the type of woman whose complicity helps keep not just herself, but all the other women in her life firmly chained to their lives of misery. Part, as Molly (iykyk) so succinctly put it ‘of the f***ing problem.’ The fact that she managed to care for all the other emotional orphans in the neighbourhood with such tenderness, however heartwarming, only made me want to yell at her all the more.
Mostly, I loved the writing and Jan’s chapters, without fail, left me wrecked. There was very little sentimentality in the prose which heightened the sense of gloom throughout. It’s been almost a week since I finished reading the book and I find myself still deeply affected by the story. Still wanting to give Jan the biggest hug. Still wanting to scream at Nedra. Still marvelling at certain lines and phrases. That, as far as I’m concerned, is the mark of a story well-told.